One Video,
Massive Impact

How One Video Can Change Your Entire Brand

  1. Nailing Your Messaging

  1. Visualizing Your Product

  2. Demonstrating How Your Technology Works

  3. Design Elements That Build Your Brand

  4. Crafting Your Brand Identity

Your startup will need all of these assets if you’re planning on getting into marketing. We’ve found that being strategic about the video creation process allows you to create a consistent, premium brand overhaul across all channels simultaneously. For tech startups with a placeholder website, no branding and no content, this can become the ultimate efficiency hack. The following is your proven formula to create an entire brand’s worth of best-in-class content in one fell swoop.

Messaging

1. Distilling your USP is everything.

Learning how your tech works is the job of your content creator.

I attended my first tech industry event on new energy grid startups at the Newlabs accelerator in Brooklyn, NY. Government officials and the fire department were present because the problem was so multi-faceted, any solutions in the space involved them as key parties. I sat through presentations on ways to improve our energy grid from 5 startups and I only remembered 1. ElectricFish.

They were the only one that had distilled down their Unique Selling Point to the level of polish that earned mental real estate. The difference was so stark, I went up to their booth and shook the founder’s hand. That’s the power of getting this right.

Clearly communicating how you’re different, how you’re better is 90% of the marketing lift for your business. And it’s not an expensive skillset, it just takes thought. The most valuable difference your can make from a marketing point of view is nailing your USP across concept & copy. The goal should be to make it should be so simple that anyone can understand it.

2. Make a decision about your copy.

A script for one project alone took 6 months to nail down.

Finalizing the verbiage held up the entire production pipeline. The client had a version they brought to the table but we felt it was worthwhile to fight for a more accessible script. We tried writing it for them, shedding all but the essentially acronyms and insider lingo. A tug of war ensued as we tried to balance discussing the tech & keeping the video understandable to a layman audience.

We were premiering this video at a conference and the deadline arrived without a final approval. 2 days before the conference we pulled together the latest version and tailored it to fit the animations on the visual side, doing what had to be done. There was no other choices left to make.

Text is easy to change, yet hugely impactful. This is a potent combination that makes it irresistible to tweak. You can avoid this by committing to a version and running with it. The fact is, the version we ended up with was (shocker) not radically different than the version we initially proposed. Exploring every option may give you peace of mind, but there needs to be a hard cut-off point or else you will get stuck at the starting line and burn unnecessary time & money on your project.


Here is the script we started with, with the final revision on the right:

3 Outsiders make great translators.

When trying to translate your technology for a target audience (ie investors or consumers), it’s valuable to work with others who don’t come from a technical background. By placing themselves in an engineer’s world, they offer a necessary outsider’s opinion that becomes the surrogate for your audience.

As a founder, you spend every waking hour of the day in a world where your product makes sense. The terminology you use to describe it makes perfect sense to your team. But you live and breath in a world where you may have forgotten what it’s like to absorb this information for the first time. It’s your hire’s job to remind you how to be a good teacher.

Just by being a patient, curious person they can actually become the mirror you need to rethink your pitch. If they don’t understand how your product works, then they can’t write a script that makes sense. Translating that on-screen requires an even greater level of understanding. Comprehension is a pre-requisite to creating any content that makes sense.

Visual Development

4. Your product is a work-in-progress. Designers help you make decisions.

Most startups are still very much figuring out their product in real-time.

Our company Machine Mythology builds photorealistic 3D models. On a recent project, we were given a product diagram to start out with that was essentially an outline with a couple of rectangles. To fill in the gaps required many 2-3 hours calls with the CEO trying to get up to speed on what changes occurred in new designs. (And this example is from a Series C company, so you can imagine how this applies to companies at an even earlier stage)

Everything from aesthetics, components & functionality are all liable to shift. When modeling a client’s product in 3D, we’ve found it’s crucial to have your designer build your design files with a procedural approach. (Ex: Most 3D programs have procedural elements but Houdini is completely built around this concept.) This means you can be prepared for changes when they happen.

5. Chaos requires creativity.

Information gaps present an opportunity for the right content creator to use their creativity to their advantage.

In startup land, there’s a scarcity of concrete resources and information as all hands are on-deck building the product. That means that content designers have to employ a lot of imagination to fill in the gaps. The right designer can take this and flesh out your idea as if it’s complete, while the wrong one will end up with an end product as barebones as their source material.

Elevating a company’s prototypes involves a combination of research and art direction. Their taste can really shape the look of the final design. When working with Terrament, modeling the layout live in 3D taught both of us a lot about what the design needed to look like. Below is the methodology I used to shape the final design from sketch to 3D lock for a computer-chip client, working within their schematic constraints while adding real-world touches to bring the final product to life.

6. Better content = better performance.

So many tech companies have what I call the minimum viable imagery. (MVI)

Coming from design studios & entering the tech space, we weren’t sure that creating high-fidelity content was really necessary to tell their story. Was the ugly, animated video effective enough to communicate or was a higher fidelity actually helpful? While low-quality mocks do a good job of conveying the ideas, the qualitative effect of well-rendered imagery really does accomplish the goal of getting people excited about an idea. And our clients got results:

”After we put your video in the homepage, there’s a huge spike in the number of clicks on the homepage.” - Andrea Giannini, Founder of Exovolar

The more realistic it is, the easier it becomes to believe that this idea could become real. Sometimes it’s hard for you as the founder to convey what you’re doing to an investor. Investors don’t understand R&D. Prototypes require imagination. That’s why SpaceX built a 1:1 scale mockup of one of their first rockets just to show investors what they were actually building.

Ultimately, the goal of any marketing effort is to get you to believe in something. The more your content can ground your product in real-life, the less burden your pitch is putting on your audience’s imagination. It teaches them how your product works in a manner that no amount of speech, text or diagrams ever will. Showing is in fact, the simplest & most effective form of communication.

Here are some A/B comparisons from the original imagery used by companies we’ve worked with and the content we’ve created.

7. One video can be enough.

The truth is, most startups don’t need an audience. Especially if you are B2B, you don’t need an endless amount of content.

What you do need, is at least one good representation of your product so that the people you are pitching can understand it. The objective is to go from 0 to 1 with product representation not create an entire marketing campaign for your investors.

8. The container matters.

As a startup founder, you’re likely to try embedding the video content you spent months building in an ugly website.

I know you didn’t mean to. You just need a new website & new branding at the same time as they need content. One of those objectives needs to happen first. If you try this, it’s up to you to make sure your video is the centerpiece and not a drop in a bucket of WIP design.

That’s why we propose using the 3D models you created on the website. 90% of the work is already done, you just need to have your designer render out a few more angles. Then, you can utilize your expensive 3D assets for free to create web content that matches your video content. A web developer can implement your designs in a simple layout that can mirror the information flow you used to communicate your process in the video, keeping the communication consistent across the two.


We believe the landing page video gives you everything they need to make an equally impressive website. By the time they’ve completed your video, 75% of the work of updating your site has already been decided, just in a different context. Messaging, product visualization, design elements are all ripe to be repurposed in the (simpler) context of web design. If you have a website you’ve already invested in, at least coach your web developer to use full-bleed video so that your expensive content has a huge impact on your site.

9. One video can create entire content systems.

Most startups need work across all areas of design. (web, brand & content)

In the process of creating a landing page video, it turns out you create a lot of assets that can be used to elevate other aspects of marketing. You can repurpose assets from the production process such as product models, logo animations and visual assets from the video to get your clients the bang for the buck startups are looking for.

We truly believe 3D is the most potent tools for startups who are traditionally trying to stretch a dollar as far as possible. It may not be the cheapest upfront. (3D can be very labor intensive) Ultimately, you build assets you can use and reuse in a way that video and 2D animation doesn’t allow. Plus, 3D imagery is the only type of imagery that can accurately re-create any hardware products to really demonstrate to investors what they are investing in, ahead of time.

For reference, here’s some elements from a video we did for Exovolar, spun off into elevated logo animations, product imagery and social content with minimal effort.

Implementation

Final Thoughts

  1. Optimize Your Message

  2. Show Instead Of Tell

  3. Implement Efficiently


Machine Mythology happens to offers one package that takes promising startups from prototype to premium. Cheaper, faster and more effectively than anybody else. Book call to learn more about how our Production Presentation Playbook can simplify your marketing efforts with optimal results.